The Week. Old Injuries and Old Addictions (Coffee, that is)

(Note, this thread was a draft that was on hold since some date in 2019. . . was doing some checking on old drafts and realized I hadn't posted it).

The past week, well two weeks, haven't been the greatest on Earth for me.

Not the worst either.  And all of these problems are in the nature of "First World" problems.  I.e,. they aren't real problems at all.

For Lent I gave up any alcohol, save in social settings.  This is not a particularly big deal save for the fact that as a lawyer, I am actually fairly frequently in social settings where having a beer is the  norm (or alternatively a cocktail, but I'm not a cocktail guy really, so I'll usually have a beer).  What giving up alcohol reminds you of is how often that's the case.

Other than that, it was no big deal.  I just didn't buy any beer, and still haven't, to bring home over Lent.  We have a lot of whiskey here right now which came in as gifts, but as I rarely drink it, that doesn't present a challenge to my Lenten resolutions.  I like beer on the other hand, but not so much that I need to be like people who give up smoking for Lent and then resume at 12:01 on Holy Saturday.  As more and more the evidence is, or might be, or could be, that any alcohol isn't really good for you, pretty advanced moderation is probably generally a good idea.

Coffee's another matter, apparently.

I just ran out of coffee sometime prior to Holy Saturday and I'm not going to make a special trip to the grocery store to buy it.  So I didn't.  I worked on Good Friday, the first day I'd run out, and thought I was doing fine but in reality I was really sleepy in a weird sort of way all day.

Anyhow, having gone a day without it, I just thought I'd keep on keeping on.  One less thing to buy at the grocery store.  Saturday I was less weirdly sleepy.  But still sleepy.  Oddly, I found that coffee is such a part of my morning routine that what was mostly missed is just drinking coffee.  Odd.  Anyhow, as I've been getting very  little sleep of late, this seemed like a good thing to omit.

And so into Sunday morning, by which time I'd actually bought a bag of Boyers as I had to go to the grocery store anyhow and my son tagged along with me, and he's picked up the coffee affliction.  So I had one cup.

Made quite a difference.

Monday I had an early morning trip to Gillette.  So I made a pot and drank it before I went.

I'm drinking coffee now.

Back into the coffee habit, I guess.

In my case, I don't know that this is good.  I do think that my work day is tense enough that I don't need a morning stresser.  I'll have to ponder this.

Adding to the stress is that on Saturday I re-injured my back.

I broke a couple of vertebrae when I was 13 in a skiing accident.  I broke both bones in my lower right leg in the same accident and the cracked vertebrae weren't detected at the time.  That injury was detected upon the occasion of my breaking a couple of ribs and collapsing a lung in my late 30s or early 40s.  An extra showed that the vertebrae had naturally fused as a result of the accident.

I've had as an adult the affliction, from time to time, of "aching back", but it wasn't up until then that I knew what actually caused it. As they are fused, it's nothing to be concerned about, as I've gotten along all these years just fine.  It rarely bugs me that much.

But on Saturday I sat in a camp chair that put all sorts of weird stresses on my back and by mid afternoon I was an absolute mess. By nighttime I was in agony.  I couldn't sleep hardly at all.  The next day I resorted to Tylenol which I rarely do.  Entire years go by where I don't take a painkiller.  But I had to take them for a couple of days.

I'm fine now, but that was the pits.

The Long Range Desert Group in North Africa. These guys needed to hydrate.

On odd stressers, yesterday I was in a deposition with a younger lawyer who believes in "hydrating".  I think hydrating, unless you are in an atholetic endeavor, is one of those modern items of baloney advaice that experts afflict people with in dietary fashions.  If you are thirsty, drink something.  Otherwise, being in the basement of a bank all day taking depositions doesn't require you to drink a half gallon of water.

What that will do, however, is make sure that you to go to the old latrine. . . a lot. We must have taken a zillion near emergency bathroom breaks. That's just embarrasing.

I speant most of my early youth outdoors as much as possible and still do if I can find time.  Before I went to basic training, I never carried water in the field.  Indeed, I only really started to after I had kids.  That's not really the smartest thing to do, but I do know that I can go all day without water, as I've done it a zillion times, in fairly active situations.  I'm not saying that's smart, and I now carry a canteen.  Even at that, however, I still come home usually with most of the water I took with me.

I hate those plastic water botters that show up everywhere now.  It's a weird modernism.  Bottling water in plastic is the antithesis of good planning in accordance with a concern for hte environment and its just goofy.  Anyhow, when a deposition starts at 9:00 the first concern I don't have, ever, is if there's anything to drink.  I don't ask for coffee myself in such situation and I certainly don't expect a basket or bucket of water.  I wouldn't drink half a gallon of it either.  We're not crossing the Sinai for goodness sakes.